CBC Diversity
Month
Originally posted on the Diversity in YA blog by Laura Goode
I like to call my YA novel, Sister Mischief, the world’s first interracial gay hip-hop love story for teens. It’s hardly news to anyone reading this blog that young adult literature has historically suffered a dearth of queer protagonists and strong, whole characters of color. Including those identities in my novel was important to me, but as a white woman who’s in a committed relationship with a man, part of me wondered, am I entitled to borrow these skins?
While I was writing SM, I thought a lot about a phenomenon I’ve come to call the Good White Person Syndrome (GWPS). GWPS involves not just being a honky with positive values about race, but more sensitively, figuring out how to convey to others, especially people of color, that you are not a racist like Bad White People are. To be a GWP, you must banish the following phrases from your vocabulary:
“Some of my best friends are [insert non-white ethnicity here].”
“Can I touch your hair?”
“[Insert non-white ethnicity here] babies are SO ADORABLE.”
“No, but where are you FROM?”
Early on in my editorial career, I worked on a series that featured a group of friends. The characters were already somewhat diverse (I think out of five or six main characters, two were characters of color), but I suggested to the freelance editor the possibility of adding one more. She said she’d consider it, but was leaning towards not, because wouldn’t it feel too forced and unrealistic?
I think as adults, we’re perhaps too aware of examples of this “forced multiculturalism”—TV shows, movies, books where there’s one black, one white, one Asian, one Latino character, etc. But as a kid, I never saw this as a bad thing—I wanted it, forced or not—and to many kids (and adults), it isn’t unrealistic and it isn’t forced. It’s an accurate mirror of their own experience.
When I was in high school in Southern California, my group of friends included kids from almost every ethnic group. As a young adult working at Barnes & Noble in downtown Oakland, my group of bookseller friends was also very naturally diverse. One of my coworkers, who referred to himself as Chicano (he told me this meant he was the child of Mexican immigrants born in the United States—but as Wendy mentioned, it’s ever-changing!), told me that when he was a kid, he had two best friends, one was black and one was white. Not a far cry from Bill Konigsberg’s characters in Out of the Pocket.
As an author who believes there is great power in diversity of thought and experience, I am definitely a diverse author. In my first novel, Out of the Pocket, I wanted to make sure that my cast of characters reflected the diversity of our culture. In that novel, my main character is a gay Caucasian male. His best friend, Austin, is half Mexican and half Caucasian. His other best friend, Rahim, is African American. I do think that there is a tendency in young adult fiction to whitewash our culture, which may relate to the fact that a high percentage of YA authors are white. In each of my books, I make a point of showing racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity. I do this because I think it is so important for teens to see themselves reflected in literature.
When I joined this committee in January I jumped into the middle of a discussion that’s full of terms and ideas I need to think about.
As I read through various blog posts I was struck by the different points of view, even on the use of “diverse,” and “diversity.” For instance, Annie Schutte posted an interview with the Diversity Committee on the YALSA’s The Hub blog and there were two comments:
I started thinking about other terms. For instance, when is “African-American” correct? When might one use “black?”
Tell us about your most recent book and how you came to write it.
O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
I recently heard Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas on On the Media with Bob Garfield talking about why he feels it is important to rethink and revise the nomenclature used to describe immigrants lacking the proper paperwork to live and work in this country. (Vargas “came out” as an undocumented immigrant in the New York Times Magazine in 2011.) Most media outlets, and indeed most people, use the term “illegal immigrants” or “illegal aliens” but Vargas is advocating for the use of “undocumented immigrant” because he finds it to be a more accurate term. In the interview he said, “My beef, such as it is, with the term “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” is the fact that they’re inaccurate and imprecise. To be in this country without papers is actually a civil offense, not a criminal one.”
Bob Garfield did not seem entirely convinced (you can read the transcript of the full interview or listen to the audio to get your own take on the exchange) and his push back led Vargas to articulate another aspect of his argument, one that resonated with me a great deal. He said, “Actions are illegal, not people. Can you imagine, like, hearing this word “illegal” and knowing that it refers to you, what that does to somebody?”
